{"id":76028,"date":"2026-06-05T14:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/76028\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T14:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:53:07","slug":"too-soon-to-call-recession-rules-canadian-authority-on-economic-downturns-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/76028\/","title":{"rendered":"Too soon to call recession, rules Canadian authority on economic downturns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The unofficial authority on recession calls in Canada says it\u2019s too soon to use that word to describe the sluggish economy.<\/p>\n<p>Debate has raged on Parliament Hill over whether the country is in a recession since Statistics Canada reported last week that the economy shrank for two quarters in a row.<\/p>\n<p>The C.D. Howe Institute\u2019s Business Cycle Council is traditionally viewed as the arbiter for calling a recession in Canada.<\/p>\n<p>The council said in a bulletin Friday that two quarters of declining GDP in a row are not sufficient to call a recession and urged caution over reading too much into the recent data.<\/p>\n<p>The group of economists argued weakness in Canada\u2019s economy is not yet widespread or persistent enough to warrant the recession label, and the marginal decline in the first quarter of the year will be subject to revisions in the months ahead.<\/p>\n<p>The report noted GDP increased in more than half the sectors in the Canadian economy in the first quarter of 2026, showing that the economic slowdown was not pervasive. The economists also pointed to two consecutive quarters of declining unemployment as indicators Canada is not in a recession.<\/p>\n<p>Statistics Canada reported Friday the Canadian economy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/news\/economy\/economy-adds-88000-jobs-in-may\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">added 88,000 jobs in May<\/a>, while the unemployment rate fell to 6.6% compared with 6.9% in April.<\/p>\n<p>The C.D. Howe economists said they are ready to meet again to discuss a possible recession call if broad-based economic strain emerges in both GDP and employment figures.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past week, the Conservatives have laid the blame for a \u201cfull-blown recession\u201d at the feet of the Liberal government, while Prime Minister Mark Carney has argued growth will be uneven as the government tries to pivot the economy away from reliance on the United States.<\/p>\n<p>C.D. Howe\u2019s Business Cycle Council pushed back against using \u201ctechnical recession\u201d to describe a slowdown marked solely by two contracting quarters of GDP.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe adjective \u2018technical\u2019 is sort of designed to convey the idea that it\u2019s official or scary. But it\u2019s really just a rule of thumb,\u201d said Steve Ambler, co-chair of the think tank\u2019s Business Cycle Council.<\/p>\n<p>When real GDP declined for two consecutive quarters in 2015 in response to tanking oil prices, recession debates raged then as well. But the business council ultimately determined those declines didn\u2019t meet the bar for a recession.<\/p>\n<p>The council\u2019s bare minimum for a recession is actually just one quarter of contraction \u2014 but that decline would have to be sharp enough and reach most sectors of the\u00a0economy.<\/p>\n<p>The business cycle council said the upcoming review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA, will continue to cause worries about economic growth for the next few quarters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The unofficial authority on recession calls in Canada says it\u2019s too soon to use that word to describe&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,4613,20330,28067,401,8791],"class_list":["post-76028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-canada","tag-canadian-economy","tag-gdp","tag-recession","tag-trade","tag-unemployment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}